6 months to become a web developer

After a very busy October, I return with armfuls of good news and a new resource for you, my dear reader. Back in August we finished our quiz (to which we give our thanks to Richard’s site – JS is Sexy) and hopefully, that gave you the confidence and appetite to approach new JavaScript projects. I did suggest continuing with Richard’s curriculum and taking a look at backbone and node. However, it occurs to me that perhaps that backbone.js is currently a jump too far, so at this juncture I’m suggesting we could do with a bit more practice in JS fundamentals.(more…)

A confession this week, I don’t have any suggestions for what you should be studying – I’ve been busy creating this blog. I’ve tied up these 3 weeks in a hessian bag and thrown them onto the train line, mustache and hat completing my evil tirade. I’m not sure if opening an account of many months of toil to the general viewing public is a good idea, it’s a bit of a gamble and I’ve invested quite a lot of time to present to you what I’ve learnt and forgotten in the previous months. Public opinion appears as a train storming the line, it could be made of steel and sharp pointy ends or cake and cashmere pillows. In the last 3 weeks I’ve been collecting and revising all I’ve covered, confusing notes I’ve made and with some difficulty, making sense of it all to deliver to you everything I’ve been studying and reading (more…)

Ryan: Because web pages are designed to be understood by people. A machine doesn’t care about layout and styling. Machines basically just need the data. Ideally, every URL would have a human readable and a machine readable representation. When a machine GETs the resource, it will ask for the machine readable one. When a browser GETs a resource for a human, it will ask for the human readable one.

(I highly recommend reading the above article, it’s a nice introduction as to what will follow this week.)

It seems there’s a great deal of tussle about which framework is better, to clarify, I’m referring to the JavaScript MVC frameworks; Backbone.js, Angular.js and Ember.js – in fact there’s too many to list and apologies if I’ve missed your fanboy favorite. We’re garden variety beginners, who, still hungover from celebrating our dynamic quiz victory, (courtesy of “Learn JS properly” – and if you haven’t finished that course…what are you waiting for! Get back there and do it.) we’ve climbed back on the horse, where to next? (more…)

We’re flirting with danger, moving out of the comfort zone with fashioned with WordPress and into the thorny ill-fitting world of Drupal. But soberly I’ll intone to re-assure that Drupal is neither prickly nor uncomfortable, I actually quite like it, and it’s worth knowing. You might have seen people comparing the market share of Drupal and WordPress, demonstrating that WordPress kicks Drupal all over the park here, however we know better than to judge it simply on this. (more…)

Fakery and chicanery, sounds like a movement in the history of furniture design, but it’s not; I’m afraid I made a bit of a faux pas this week, I created and I’m now displaying a couple of websites for businesses: businesses that don’t exist. I had been warned off doing this by a few things I’d read on the internet, though, let’s be clear that I do clearly state the fictional nature of the websites. (I don’t wish to upset anybody) Although they sit in my Bee Smart portfolio (more…)

Remember May – Week 3 when I landed that bombshell upon you, a bombshell with a big fat label that read “You Don’t Know JavaScript”. Well, if you’ve finished the “Learn JS properly” curriculum, (or at least gotten to week 7) you’re making good progress. At this point I had a working quiz (more…)